YOUR ROYAL ANCESTORS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3144, 20 November 1922, Page 8

YOUR ROYAL ANCESTORS.

(By George F. M. Cocks.)

Genealogical research is not- everybody's hobby. The fascination of dusty documents and of shrivelled parchments, and the deciphering of crabbed writing of mediaeval scribes, make their appeal to very few. But the research is an adventure, dry and stuffy, perhaps, but still adventure. Take, for instance, the work just brought to a satisfactory conclusion by Miss S. I. Kimball, who is indebted to Dr. Jordan, of Stanford University, for making known to a wider audience some of the curious and entirely unexpected results at which she has arrived. It is obvious that every individual has ancestors whose numbers are doubled for every generation we go back. Wo all may claim two parents, lour grandparents, eight great-grand-parents, and so on. As we go back, generation by generation, we presently are faced with the paradox that wo may fairly claim more ancestors than there were people living at that period. The deduction is obvious; common ancestors are more usual than we are inclined to credit, and consequently cousinship is not the exception, but the rule. This fact Miss Kimball has indisputably proved. Her research concerned the family of Isabel de Werniandois,.who departed this life in 1131, and is the common ancestor of us all. This lady married twice, on each occasion a noble* of some eminence. She herself was a descendant by six genealogical routes of Charlemagne, whilst her second husband numbered Alfred the Great among his forbears. Therefore in the veins of the four children of this marriage was commingled the blood of the greatest Saxon with the greatest Frank. The vast majority of the descendants of these lour children lapsed into significance, became merged info the mass of the iinhistoried,- and so sank below the genealogist's horizon. But liy a happy set of fortuitous circumstances many can he traced with the most startling results, King George V., Abraham Lincoln and a New York farmer by Iho name of Parr, are all descendants of Isabel's children, and all three are separated from their common ancestors by twenty-seven generations'. George Washington, George 111. and Theodore Poosovelt were also among her descendants, the two Presidents, rather curiously, being separated from her by the same number of genera tii uis twenty-three. Miss Kimball, being American, is naturally more interested in tracing out tho lines, of descent of-the famous men of her own nation, but, though her specific instances are separated from us by the width of the ocean, yet Ihe threads of lives woven on the loom of time inextricably connect the Old Continent with the New, making the white English-speaking people of the world not merely kindred nations, but sons and daughters of one house, In short, Miss Kimball arrives at this conclusion, that wo art; all King and commoner, peer and peasant, (Statesman and fanner, .ami faetoryhaiul— "inbred descendants of Charlemagne," with King George as- our L'oval cousin.

Rancidity in butter is often caused by churning the cream at too high n temperature. In this case it is impossible to wash most of the casein from the butter. The type of bacteria which produces butyric acid act on the casein in the butter, and give this product a rancid ilavor.